


Unwanted

by 221b_hound



Series: Unkissed [19]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: John Loves Sherlock, John's ex is an asshat, John's past, M/M, Sherlock Loves John, Wedding Rings, fiances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the jewellers to collect their wedding rings ahead of the Big Day, an old friend of John's spots him. Well. I say 'friend'.</p><p>Sherlock isn't jealous. He's possibly a little bit grateful. That doesn't mean Lydia Templeton isn't an idiot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unwanted

“John? John Watson?””

John, gazing absent mindedly into a glass case full of engagement rings, glanced up at the voice that sounded vaguely familiar. A voice from a long time ago. One that filled him with a sudden, piercing sense of both hurt and irritation.

“It is! John!”

The woman who had paused at the door marched into the jewellery store, a wide grin on her face that didn’t quite sit right in her eyes.

“Lydia?”

She sailed up to him, seized him by the hands before he could think to move away, and kissed him on both cheeks. “How wonderful to see you! What are you doing here?” Lydia’s gaze flicked over his shoulder, to the displays of rings surmounted with diamonds. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re getting an engagement ring!”

“No, actually, I’m…”

“Of course. What was I thinking?” Lydia smiled and laughed, “John Watson, toy soldier, settling down?” Her glance darted down to his hands that she still held, registering his bare fingers. “Chance would be a fine thing.”

John blinked at her. The irritation rose up over the hurt. Oh yes. He remembered this bit well.

With his usual impeccable timing, Sherlock came swooping out of a small back room carrying a satin-lined box, flipping up the lid as he came in.

“John, here are the ri-” He froze in his tracks at the sight of this woman holding onto John’s hands. (Lipstick marks on both his cheeks. Eyes dilated. Recognition, then, and… arousal? But… tense posture, even before he’d registered Sherlock’s arrival, so it's not fear at being discovered, it's her making him tense, so the signs of arousal are not sexual but defensive. Fight or flight mode. He’s also very annoyed. Well of course. She’s very annoying, holding his hands against his will like that.)

There was the merest second, though, between the interrupted sentence and the next question. “Who’s this?”

Lydia smiled at Sherlock in an all too dazzling fashion, releasing John's hands at last. “Well, _hello,_ there. Lydia Templeton.” She held out her hand for him to shake, or possibly kiss, and when he failed to take it she turned the gesture into an odd expansive motion. “I’m an old friend of John’s. Well, ex-fiance, to be exact.” She sort of giggled. Then she nodded at the box in Sherlock’s hands. “Wedding rings, is it? Who’s the lucky lady?”

Sherlock peered at her before replying.

(Why the emphasis on _ex-fiance_? Not ex-girlfriend, or just ‘old friend’? She wants me to know both that she was once tied to him but that she was the one to end it. Defines herself by relationships. Wants to establish a rapport with me based on a prior claim on John, but only to impress me. Showing she is both desirable but has, she believes, done better. She intends to indicate she is _better_ than John somehow. What an unspeakable _idiot_. Just as well for me, perhaps... Hmm. Her smile is artificial. She’s trying too hard. Also had dental work done in her youth. Braces. She’s had a skin tuck under the neck once… no, twice. Botox in the forehead,  around the eyes, within the last week. Natural mouse brown hair, expensively dyed in subtle colours, touched up in a salon visit only this morning. Concerned to look youthful, wealthy. Vain. Insecure. Marital problems. Diverting herself from them with this chance encounter with John. Thinking _she’s_ the one who had a lucky escape. She’s _insufferable_.)

He opened his mouth to reply scathingly, only Lydia hadn’t finished yet. “You brought John along for Dutch courage in choosing them, did you? I’m not sure he’s much use as a second opinion on rings. He never was marriage material; he much preferred his ridiculous adventures. Or is he just tagging along?”

Sherlock scowled at her. “John is my…”

“Best man, I should have known. Always the bridesmaid, eh John?” she threw over her shoulder to him, still in that bright tone. “You’re not really the marrying type, are you?”

“And how’s your husband, Lydia?” asked John pointedly, “Dougal, wasn’t it?”

“Douglas,” said Lydia, rolling her eyes and giving Sherlock a smile that said ‘he’s always like this’, “You remember.”

“Yes,” said John in an easy, cool tone that Sherlock recognised as the one that usually indicated John was being magnificently restrained in the face of terminal stupidity. He was rather fond of that tone of voice. “I remember.”

“Oh, you’re not still cross, are you? You were never happier than when I sent you that letter breaking the engagement. You were much too busy playing soldier to grow up and settle down.”

Lydia’s tone was light, like she wasn’t insulting John’s career, his courage, the lives he fought to save, the ones he _actually_ saved – and devaluing John’s own life, too, which he nearly lost.

John was breathing carefully through his mouth, though his jaw was actually clenched. That was the kind of breathing that often heralded mild bloodshed. In other circumstances, that was another John-thing that Sherlock found quite stimulating, but in the current situation it was less welcome. John wasn’t about to punch this awful woman, no matter how he was breathing, but he was clearly deeply agitated.

(Not merely angry, though. The lines around his eyes meant he was remembering distressing things. From when he got her letter. The circumstances of receiving it were unpleasant. Could have been the contents – a literal and figurative Dear John letter – but John’s hand was clenching, as it did when he’d been having nightmares. The receipt of the letter was mixed up with other events. The kind of events that gave John nightmares.)

“Oh, I’m not cross about the letter,” John said, “Timing could have been better, of course. I had to wash someone’s blood off it before I could read the second page, where all the juicy stuff about Dougal the Plastic Surgeon was.” Then he smiled. The smile that could be used to cut diamonds.

Lydia laughed, nervously and then more boldly. “You always did have the most appalling sense of humour, John.”

“Terrible taste in women, too,” he said.

“Oh, now you’re just being rude, John. That’s unworthy of you.” And with that, the dreadful woman turned to Sherlock and attempted to be both sophisticated and flirtatious. “Honestly, he’s insufferable sometimes, isn’t he? You’ve probably noticed. Fingers crossed he doesn’t do something unspeakable to you on your buck’s night. I think he gets jealous of tall, good-looking men.”

Sherlock was so horrified by this woman he had to think a moment for the best opening cut as he drew breath to slice her to ribbons – but then he caught John’s eye over her shoulder.

And John was grinning at him.

A proper grin. A little wicked, a little sly, a lot like they were sharing a secret, just the two of them.

Sherlock loved that particular smile.

“I’ve never found him to be especially jealous,” Sherlock said to Lydia. He smiled at John, a warm and wonderful smile, just for John, but also for her to see that it was just for John. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Of you being tall and gorgeous? Fuck no. Pretty chuffed, actually.”

“And you may be shorter than I am,” Sherlock said, “But I do consider you perfectly formed.”

“Thanks, honeybee.” John reached out, and Sherlock reached out, and they held hands. John turned his proud, smug smile towards Lydia. “I didn’t introduce you properly before. Sherlock, this is Lydia Templeton, my ex-fiance, who decided a plastic surgeon gave her better social standing than an impoverished army doctor. Lydia, this is Sherlock Holmes, who’ll be my husband in about two weeks’ time.  We have adventures together. He’s brilliant, stunning, funny, and there’s not a picket fence in sight. So he’s pretty much perfect for me. I can trust him to clip me over the ear if I get some stupid notion about growing up and settling down, to bring me back to my senses.”

“Oh John,” rumbled Sherlock in a teasing laugh, “As if you’ll ever grow up and settle down while there are crimes to solve, killers to catch and idiots to throw into the Thames.”

Lydia stared from one to the other, at their joined hands, then at John, and then at Sherlock. “You’re marrying _him_?”

“Certainly I am,” said Sherlock with hauteur, squeezing John’s hand, “I would do it this afternoon, but Mrs Hudson would be insufferable.”

“She’s doing the cake,” John explained conspiratorially, “She’d bloody kill us if we eloped.”

“I wouldn’t mind eloping,” sighed Sherlock, sounding put-upon.

“I want to see you in that suit, and watch the way you grimace when you get confetti in your hair. Then help you comb it all out with my fingers, sweetpea.”

Sherlock’s expression morphed into one of dreamy speculation. “That sounds acceptable.”

They had in fact noticed that Lydia had left during this conversation, but they didn’t much care.

“Here are the rings, John,” said Sherlock, holding up the box, finally getting to the conversation he’d wanted all along, “Mr Alrhabi said to check the engravings are to our satisfaction before we leave.”

John took the ring Sherlock handed to him, being careful not to look closely at the one Sherlock was examining. They’d agreed not to look at the words they’d chosen for one another until the big day. Well, John had, and Sherlock had at least decided to refrain from verbalising his deductions.

Satisfied that no errors had been made in the engraving, they each replaced the rings in the box. Sherlock snapped the lid closed, then slid the box into his pocket. They bid farewell to the store owner and, holding hands, went out into London to walk home.

As they walked side by side, Sherlock fixed John with pursed lips and raised eyebrow.

“Don’t,” said John.

“But…”

“I was young.”

Sherlock’s eyebrow continued to interrogate his betrothed.

“I reiterate. _Young._  We met at uni, a place notorious for kids who aren’t good for each other to hook up and make a hash of it.”

Sherlock winced at that and John, realising what he’d just said, leaned in to Sherlock’s side as they walked. “You were never alone in that, snugglepie. You and Victor probably at least had more in common than Lydia and me. I did medicine full time on a scholarship and worked my arse off, she did business management because she didn’t know what she wanted except to own a business and be fabulous at it, and then she skipped half her lectures.”

“I still fail to understand what you saw in her.”

“She was good for me, back then. She helped me study. She sat up some nights helping me memorise bones and blood vessels. But she got me out of study hall and made me sit in the fresh air from time to time, too.” John shrugged, “And then I was about to be off on my first tour with the army and she was crying all the time, and I thought it would make her happy to get engaged, and I thought it would be nice to know someone was waiting at home for me.”

John huffed a sigh. “That’s when it became clear we really didn’t have much in common - those first couple of letters she sent, talking all about shoe shopping, the cheek of her landlord demanding rent payments on time, gossiping about everyone we knew from uni, and planning our future lives with a nice little clinic near a nice little house, in a nice little suburb with a nice little garden. She never asked much about my life or what I wanted. When I said I intended to stay in the army… well, you saw what she thought about that.”

Sherlock grunted his opinion of her opinion.

“I was trying to work out how to let her down gently when she dumped me for an up and coming plastic surgeon. Her letter came on a very bad day. I didn’t have time to read it because the sirens went, and I didn’t remember it was in my pocket until after the team had been in surgery for ten straight hours.” He frowned. “I was exhausted but proud of saving as many lives as we did. And _she_ wrote to say I was wasting my time and my future playing at heroics, and she was tired of waiting for me to see sense, and she'd found this wonderful man with a bright career ahead of him instead.”

“She clearly didn’t know you at all if she thought that quiet domesticity was ever going to appeal to you, John,” said Sherlock, tucking John’s arm under his own so that they walked more closely together. “You need purpose and a life of direct action. I can’t think of a worse fate for you than a little suburban home and two kids and a _landrover_.  It would have driven you mad.”

“That it would,” John agreed. He sighed. “I don’t think it would have hurt at all if she’d just decided she didn’t want to marry someone who was going to be away so much, or working in such a dangerous environment. I’d only have applauded her good judgement. But it was clear from her letter that she had no respect for me at all, and that I was dumped for a better _paycheck_.” It still rankled, it seemed, despite John’s own intentions to break the engagement.

“Well, I don’t love you for your paycheck at all,” said Sherlock, “And I positively adore your taste for adventure.” He stopped on the street and turned to face John.

The clouds of past humiliation cleared from John’s expression as Sherlock pressed a kiss to his temple, then his cheek. John tilted his head up to let Sherlock kiss his mouth too, and then Sherlock kissed his nose.

“I shouldn’t dislike her so much,” said Sherlock, “After all, her failure to value you at even a fraction of your immeasurable worth has led to this. You, here with me.”

“And to those rings in your pocket.” John slid a hand down Sherlock’s arm, to his hand, and he squeezed Sherlock’s fingers. “So, yeah.” John smiled and closed a hand over Sherlock’s lapel, drawing him closer. “I’m glad she didn’t appreciate me either. I know _you_ do.”

“I do.”

John grinned at Sherlock, delighted, and Sherlock, realising what he’d said, blinked, then grinned back.

And then they kissed for a long time, out there in the streets of London, under a grey sky day with the sun breaking through.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Unwanted [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7514764) by [Lockedinjohnlock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lockedinjohnlock/pseuds/Lockedinjohnlock)




End file.
